Moses Botkin October Challenge: B&W to Color

The puzzler this month was from Challenge group member Robin Cheers. She emailed a black and white photo she had taken to group members last month and asked us to use it to make a color painting, adding the color in the same values as what the grey tones were in the reference.

(left)
"Fetching"
Oil on hardboard
10"x8"
©2011 Diana Moses Botkin

(You can bid on this piece here.)

After painting, we were to change the image in Photoshop and see what it looked like in B&W, then compare the values to the original reference photo.

Although I didn't quite get the values matched to the reference picture, I left it as painted. I felt the original photo was a bit contrasty and hard to read, so I used my artistic license to help it read better.

This made for a good Challenge. Although I've worked from B&W references before, it's been awhile. Plus, it can be tricky painting from someone else's photo, trying to figure out what's going on.

You can see all the Challenge paintings from the whole group at my blog.

They're all quite fun and it's interesting to see how similarly or differently the paintings turned out.